The 7/7 inquiry came up with a stack of life-saving proposals. Will they be acted upon? Fat chance

I read the words "failure to communicate" and "lessons to be learned" with resignation and despondency. It was predictable that the inquiry into the aftermath of the 7/7 bomb outrage would find that that much of the chaos that ensued was caused by lack of communication - between and within the emergency services, transport officials, hospitals, the police, tube drivers, passengers and the wider public. The recommendations in the London Assembly's report are largely centred on improving these various avenues of communication, technologically and administratively. So far, so sensible.

I would not be despondent if I believed that the lessons of July 7 would indeed be learned, that the important recommendations would be implemented with urgency, that a further large-scale emergency in London (or in another big city, for there is no guarantee that London will monopolise terrorist attacks or other disasters) would be handled with the efficiency so lacking last July. But history, experience and human nature are against any optimism.

I fear and expect that the necessary response will, at best, be slow and fragmented, at worst absent. It is not that anyone, or anybody, will be deliberately obstructive. The failure to install a communication system that could work underground - as recommended by the King's Cross fire inquiry 18 years ago - was not the result of a decision to abandon the project, but because it was too much trouble and expense to do the job, and no one in government cared enough to intervene.

We're not very good at assembling various agencies, each with their own agendas, and making them cooperate, and there is no single authority - by which I mean the government - capable or willing to enforce change. Take the fact that the police, fire brigade and ambulances - the three most important services in a serious crisis - operate on different radio networks, and therefore cannot communicate with one another. The idiocy and possible grave consequences of these incompatibilities has been appreciated for many years; it should not have needed a disaster to emphasise them. But there has been no one with the clout, the power or the will to do anything about it.

This insipid attitude to the aftermath of tragedies is not confined to terrorist-related events. Every inquiry into a fatal train crash reveals that recommendations made by previous, similar inquiries have not been acted on. Lives have been needlessly lost.

And every year or so, a lovely child dies after being beaten and tortured by someone close to him or her. Maria Colwell and Victoria Climbié are names that come to mind but there are many more who do not make the headlines. Time and again, it turns out that people - police, social workers, probation officers, health workers, neighbours, chaps down the pub - knew or strongly suspected that the child was being maltreated, but did nothing about it. Equally inevitably, inquiries find that the various public services had failed to pass on their knowledge or concerns to other agencies, but had felt unable to take action on their own. The inquiries make stern and urgent recommendations to ensure better communication between those charged with responsibility for the welfare of children. This must not happen again, everyone says. Nothing is done, the next child is killed and the tragic circle starts again.

There are some indications that the July 7 report may fare better than most inquiries. There has been a start to the improvement of communications systems, especially those that operate underground. There is no reason to have faith that they will be put into place relatively soon, or that they will work. Regrettably, a lesson learned doesn't necessarily mean a problem solved.

The ball is slightly lighter this time, which means that it will absorb more spin and make it marginally more difficult for goalkeepers to control, which in turn might result in a few more goals due to goalkeeping errors. This is, I assure you, crucial information, perhaps making the difference between wealth and penury. The ball in question is that to be used in the World Cup, and a fortune is to be made by correctly predicting the number of goals scored during the whole tournament. Or the total number of red or yellow cards issued by referees, the exact time taken to score the fastest goal, or even the total of the numbers on the back of a team's shirts at the end of a game. Much of my week has been spent studying the data that will determine the nature and extent of my judicious investments. Never has the choice of bets (a hateful word, suggesting an element of chance) been so vast. The days are long gone when all I had to do was pick the team I thought would win, then boast for hours that I had cleverly managed to get better odds at Ladbrokes than I had been offered by William Hill. It's all spread betting now, and to those of you who don't quite know how it works, I need only explain that spread betting is a process which allows an investor to lose a lot of money very quickly. There are rumours, unsubstantiated, that you can also win a lot; I discount them. Come to think of it, spread betting is so dangerous that a couple of years ago I vowed never to indulge in it again. I'm glad I remembered that. So I will dump my lighter ball, my stricter referees and my quick goalscorers and put my all on France to win the cup. And I'm getting 14 to 1 from William Hill when Ladbrokes offered only 12.

I get cross about such trivial things. I'm told that Peter Crouch scored a hat trick for England against Jamaica on Saturday. No he didn't. He scored three goals. But they were not consecutive. Other people's goals intervened. Therefore it was not a hat trick. In cricket, where the term originated, it means that a bowler has taken three wickets with successive balls, not that he has taken three wickets any old how. Many dictionaries I consulted agreed that consecutivity was an essential agreement. Sadly, others pointed out that, in some sports, hat trick is used to refer to a player scoring three goals, even if not in a row. I have tried, without success, to find out when this nasty extension of the word entered the language. What is particularly annoying is that Peter Crouch, when he was with us at Aston Villa, failed to score a hat trick of any kind, however wrongly defined.